Chicken Enchilada Empanadas

Weeknight dinners can really be challenging, especially if you work outside the home or have kids in sports or other after school activities. Families need fast dinner solutions, meals that taste great but won’t take forever to cook. I love making homemade bread. But, let’s face it, homemade bread takes hours and when you walk in the door from a long day, you simply don’t have the energy or the time to make bread from scratch. So you might be thinking that empanadas sound great, but aren’t quick and you don’t have time to be messing with making dough. Well, I have a treat for you then!

To test out just how easy these are to make, I asked my 19 year old daughter, currently a college student living with roommates, to make it with me.

The results were positively delicious, and yes, very easy. Ready to try it yourself?

You’re going to need one of those rotisserie chickens you can get already cooked at the grocery store. If you prefer, you can cook up a chicken breast. You’ll also need a can of Pillsbury Grands biscuits, a can of enchilada sauce (or if you like, you can make this homemade enchilada sauce and freeze it for nights like this), an additional filling like Mexicorn, roasted red peppers or maybe black beans, and some shredded cheddar cheese. I like to garnish, so I also chopped up some tomatoes and cilantro and served with sour cream.

Start off by pulling the breast meat off the rotisserie chicken. If you like you can add in the leg meat too. Put all that meat in a bowl and toss in about 1/4 cup of the enchilada sauce and coat the chicken with it. Turn that coated chicken out onto a cutting board and chop it up.

Put the chopped chicken back into the bowl and stir in the filling, in this case half a can of Mexi-corn.

Open a can of Grand biscuits, and using the heel of your hand flatten the biscuit to a circle. Place a large spoonful of chicken mixture onto one side of the dough circle.

Top with some cheese.

Fold the dough over the chicken mixture to create a half-circle pie. Press the ends together and crimp with a fork.

My daughter made half of these by herself and had no problems!

Line your baking sheet with parchment paper and place the empanadas onto the parchment. Drizzle the remaining enchilada sauce over the pies.

We were offered a challenge. Use one of the Pillsbury dough products and 4 other ingredients to create a tasty dinner dish. There was a table full of ingredients for us to choose from, but picking only four was really hard. Garnishes were considered optional thank goodness. ;-) Cariann and I brainstormed the idea and grabbed some rotisserie chicken, a can of enchilada sauce, a package of shredded cheese and a big red bell pepper. While I was busy roasting the red bell pepper in a skillet, Cariann got busy flattening the biscuits and shredding the chicken.

I chopped some fresh tomato and cilantro for garnish…

Meanwhile, Cariann added the final topping of cheese before the empanadas went into the oven.

Ready for the oven!

We had no idea what the results would be, but when they came out of the oven they were puffed and golden. Totally beautiful! Cariann drizzled a little enchilada sauce on for garnish.

Wow, Amanda, these are really quite beautiful for such a simple recipe! I can’t wait to try this on an upcoming weeknight. Which reminds me, I should really make some enchilada sauce now to freeze for later! :)